Consultancy and research

This digital marketing training classroom supported public access training programmes. These have now moved to in-company courses so if your team are interested then ask us about the details for you and your team.

Welcome to your Digital Training Academy: a great way to boost your knowledge and skills, helping you and your team get the most from digital marketing, publishing and communications.

All of us here at Digital hope you'll enjoy your Digital Training Academy, but we also hope you'll instantly be able to achieve more in your firm. Your learning programme includes online lessons before and after the face-to-face parts of your Digital Training Academy, and there's also an opportunity for direct tuition in your Digital Classroom.

In times of huge economic and technical change, knowledge becomes a critical success factor. Alongside the training and development services available in the Digital Training Academy, we created a series of research tools and papers you can download and share with your team. These are complimentary to all members of the Digital Training Academy.

Here is the place you can discuss issues with your tutor and other Academy participants.

Do you have questions for your tutor? Is there something that was not clear in your Digital Training Academy? Is there a new point you would like to make? Are there any new issues that you have discovered now you are applying your knowledge? Use this space to make your comments and to ask your questions. Give your comment a short title to make it easier for other students to scan, or include the title of the Academy Lesson your question relates to (if there is one). The classroom is open for three weeks following your Academy.

Why do so many brands waste millions on websites nobody visits? This is one of the tragedies of digital marketing and the rush to create sumptuous, self-indulgent sites is one of the worst examples of how easily the digital landscape can be misread.

Past, present and future: 5 steps in getting optimisation right

Optimisers are the unsung heroes of digital marketing. On their shoulders rests all the potential of targeting, accountability and media efficiency the web promises. It's a theme I started exploring back in the late 90s when it became clear that the guys who were close to the data for media groups knew more about how to increase advertiser success and satisfaction than just about anyone else. With the right analytics comes the right data, and with the right data come the insights to optimise; with these come the delivery of the promise of accountability and precision in digital marketing. And that was the theme of this talk. I explored the time-line of the cutting edge of web advertising optimisation through its first decade - from 1998 to 2008. This session explores how the battleground has shifted from simple media efficiency issues (managing the frequency and day-parting of banners and skyscrapers), to the more complex and richer models of behavioural targeting, and what lies ahead in the consumer centric advertising landscape of the digital networked society. To help firms quickly see the shape of the challenge, we included a simple five step plan for how our team approach working through the optimisation process, helping forms get the right capability and insights in place. Questions about this web analytics paper should go to Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com

This is a quick exercise to compete before your Digital Training Academy. It's to get you started in thinking about these issues and it should only take you ten minutes. We'll be using your comments in the Academy and they'll form a resource for all of the team. This briefing gives you the details...

Introducing a simple framework for best practice in online advertising and media planning. We use this model to explain the relationship between online advertising, traffic and sales. The advertising process in digital channels mirrors what marketers know from classic channels, and by unpacking the advertising effect into a funnel that describes the steps from ad attention, through advertising persuasion to sales results, marketers can better see the role advertising and the web plays in generating increased business.

The rules of the marketing game have changed. The command and control television era where big brands delivered heavyweight messaging every night to the nation, has finally melted away. In its place a radically new structure has emerged that will dominate the next twenty years of marketing. Cultural evolution, catalysed by technology and typified by the web, has empowered media-savvy consumers with the tools to filter and select in a way never before possible. Customer expectations are huge and brands are failing. Trust has switched from institutions to friends, and the barriers to the flow of information have melted. The smallest of customers can have the loudest of voices. Society will never go back.

A lesson from the Digital Creative Academy about why online advertising delivers impact

We live in a media saturated world. Audiences have become experienced in advertising. Many media are at risk of being screened out; television commercials not seen when they are fast forwarded, sections of newspapers going unread… Yet on the web the advertising is delivered the very moment the viewer requests the next page of content. Rather than an ‘opportunity to see’ that’s a guaranteed view. This means the impact of online advertising can be that much greater.

The world of marketing has changed and suddenly brands are having to face up to the reality that not every customer wants to be interrupted by the messages they have. Like an annoying pop-up, even if television, radio and print advertising is hitting the right person, when the messaging is not requested by the user, the effects can be neutral... Click here to read further

The digital networked society is a great leveller. The relationship between brands and consumers has shifted. The structure of communications has undergone this massive leap. While the smart thinking in marketing is leaping to embrace a whole new way of doing things, much of the practice in marketing still clings to the past. That's why it wasn't just gutsy, but a strategically brilliant move for Microsoft to use a television style commercial to make the point for them.

The growth of internet access has greater implications than just an additional channel in the communications mix. As people explore the new platforms, they reappraise their use of the old ones, and as audiences swell the market becomes large enough to attract investment in content, entertainment and commerce. This virtuous circle has been fuelling the Digital Networked Society (DNS) and from this research snapshot for the UK market at the end of 2007, it’s clear that Europe’s leading digital economy has entered a new phase is the dynamics of use.

Internet communications have become a routine part of the daily lives of most people in the technically advanced countries of Asia, Western Europe and North America. As part of this, online marketing has already become a mainstream part of the media mix. These facts and landmarks we collated for participants on the Digital Training Academies are a summary of the internet and marketing development Academy lectures and are intended to present a few highlights of the immense changes created through this industry.

Knowledge and training are critical for online marketers. Get it right and the internet becomes the most powerful marketing tool there's ever been, but getting it right is not straight forward. That's why I helped set up the Internet Advertising Bureau in 1997, and why I moved on from being its Chief Executive in 2005 to set up the Digital Training Academy. Thousands of marketers need to learn these new skills, so what the Digital Training Academy does is bring together senior industry figures to help them get there. Our team has been training marketers since 2001, and now through the forty academy courses, we have great ways to get your team on the fast track.

If you'd like some more background about some of the things I've done in the internet marketing and publishing industries then there's a biography in our press centre.